Top Story List May Omit The Momentous

Letter from the Editor

All over today's paper you've seen selections of the top stories of 1996, in all kinds of categories. Feel free to disagree with us. There are no right answers.

Choosing those top stories is, well, like choosing the top stories on any single day. What's interesting might not be very important. What's important might be really dull.

Over the course of a year, though, the truly momentous stories might not be the ones that grabbed headlines. Plane crashes and presidential elections preoccupied front pages throughout 1996, but such developments as the growth of the Internet, scientific advances in health care and the continued growth of the national debt may have a greater impact on all our lives in years to come.

So we made our choices for the top of the news of '96 the same way we chose the stories that belonged on the front page on any day during the year, looking for a balance between immediate impact and future implication, between instant sensation and long-term consequence.

And because the exercise is art rather than science, the variables are endless. This isn't like an election, where the choices on the ballot are what you get. If you don't like the ballot, you simply make up your own. The Associated Press asked editors around the country to cast votes for top national and world stories of the year. The AP made each item discrete: the TWA crash, the ValuJet crash, the Olympics bombing, the Olympic games, etc. We thought the plane crashes should be a unit, so we joined them (and put them at No. 2 on our list; the AP voting put the TWA crash alone at No. 1). We thought the bombing was part and parcel with the Olympic games, so the two became one item (at the top of our national list; the AP had the bombing at No. 3 and the games at No. 7).

We mashed the replacement of the Coleman Bridge together with a lot of other significant local roadbuilding to make transportation the No. 2 local story of the year. Plenty of future potential in those 1996 developments.

Sometimes it's hard, when you're slicing the list into categories that match section interests, to figure out which one belongs where. A local story, Endview, makes a great case in point. The Business section claimed it as a mall development, the Local section claimed it as a political story, and the Arts & Leisure section claimed it as a key development in historic preservation. In the end, Endview made the top ten list in all three sections.

Surely, though, we've neglected some story whose meaning will only play out on the top story lists of years to come. I'd be interested to hear from readers about stories you think didn't get the attention they deserved on the lists of the most important of 1996. E-mail me at wcorbin@tribune.com, call me at 247-2713 or drop a line by old-fashioned snail-mail at the Daily Press address.

A NEW FLAG. The end of our centennial year brings a change in the Daily Press "flag," the Gothic nameplate that announces who we are on the front page of the newspaper. That "100" art - the centennial "dingbat" that has graced our flag since the newspaper's 100th birthday last Jan. 4 - goes away. We'll return on Saturday, Jan. 4 a year later, to the unadorned flag of previous years.

You may notice slight changes in the typography of our trademark, but nothing wrenching. News Art Team Editor Michael Dabrowa has been working some of the incongruities out of the flag's characters, fixing its E and its S's and otherwise dressing it up a bit. His work represents the first change in the flag's type since we knocked off a couple of shark fins and a few curlicues a decade ago. We don't mess with these things lightly.

ONE'LL GET YOU TWO. I'd like to take just a moment to thank all those who have contributed to the Daily Press Christmas Fund, which helps to make sure needy children and needy families will have something to celebrate each holiday season. This year, in honor of the newspaper's centennial, the McCormick Tribune Foundation is matching every dollar our readers donate with a dollar from foundation funds. That means your dollars have turned into two bucks for a good cause.

It's not too late to make your donation go twice as far. You'll find details for a few more days each day in the Local section. Hope you can help us make future Christmases real for families who need your help.